Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville: My Lords, I declare my interest as a vice-president of the LGA and a district councillor in South Somerset. Taunton Deane and West Somerset have been collaborating successfully for some time and share several services and offices, as the Minister said. Taunton Deane now wishes to terminate its collaboration. Instead, it wishes to take over West Somerset. I have received many submissions from local councillors and others who are opposed to the merger, and none in favour. I shall try to briefly give the House a flavour of the communities being discussed this afternoon.
Taunton Deane Borough Council, as its name implies, includes the county town of Taunton. It has a large community and includes some rural villages and the market town of Wellington, but it can in no way be described as rural. It has excellent infrastructure in the form of the main railway line linking down to Cornwall and up to Bristol and the north of the country. It is situated on the junction of the M5 spine, which runs down the west of the country, and has a thriving hospital, a sixth-form college and FE college, several secondary schools and numerous primary schools. There is a vibrant town centre. Generally, it has everything going for it.
West Somerset is a very different area and council. It is one of the smallest, if not the smallest, district council in the country. It has extremely poor connectivity to the surrounding area. The A39, which is the main route to the largest town of Minehead, has not been updated. Seventy per cent of the landmass of West Somerset is within the Exmoor National Park. This means that the area is extremely beautiful and, with its interesting coastline, West Somerset attracts a great many tourists. However, unlike Taunton, which can rely on the new homes bonus to boost its budget, it is impossible to build large numbers of homes in West Somerset due to planning restrictions in the national park.
There are also many other challenges. The community college at Minehead takes pupils from 14 to 18 and covers an area of 600 square miles. This means that pupils travel large distances on school transport and consequently find it difficult to have any social life outside school, which the pupils in Taunton take for granted.
West Somerset is, however, the site of the nuclear power plants at Hinkley. Power station A is decommissioned but has never been removed, Hinkley B is still operational and Hinkley C is still under construction. Despite this, the roads serving Hinkley are, for the most part, rural, winding roads taking a great deal of extra traffic during the construction phase. West Somerset should have been able to count on the business rates from Hinkley. However, when the Government allowed local authorities to retain business rates, they did not transfer funds to cover historical appeals by businesses against their rating. This was an amazing sleight of hand of which many magicians would have been proud. Consequently, when Hinkley’s appeal was allowed, West Somerset had to refund £6.7 million from its meagre resources to Hinkley. Hinkley’s business rates were £5 million, but they have been reassessed at £29 million. Not surprisingly, Hinkley is trying the appeal route once again.
We have before us a David and Goliath situation. Taunton Deane is financially stable and able to plan for its future with confidence. West Somerset, although having some capital assets, has a revenue budget that is not solvent. This is due not to incompetence on the part of its officers or elected councillors but to the greatly increased costs of providing services in deep rural isolated areas, coupled with the business rates issue outlined above.
Central government does not accurately reflect rurality in its settlement for West Somerset, nor does the Boundary Commission reflect this when reviewing electoral boundaries. It takes no notice of sparsity or connectivity but focuses solely on the number of electors, hence the four county councillors who cover the whole of West Somerset have a great many parished areas to cover. In one case, that is 25 parishes.
Contrast that with the county town of Taunton, which is unparished. The draft Statutory Instrument refers to the Government’s commitment to,
“immediately carry out a Community Governance Review to ensure that the currently unparished area of Taunton is parished as soon as possible”.
I do not see any costs for that in the statutory instrument.
Now we come to the issue of democratic deficit—a subject close to my heart. Currently Taunton Deane has 56 councillors and West Somerset 28. The proposal is for 58 councillors going forward—a 32% reduction. One of the new wards will have five councillors. How is that going to work? There will be five people, potentially from different political parties, all trying to represent the views of the electorate. Many councillors cannot agree among their own party colleagues, never mind those from another party. If the number of electors demands five councillors, why not divide the ward into smaller sections and give those elected a fighting chance of doing a decent job?
West Somerset will now be covered by four divisions with a total of 13 councillors—more than a 50% reduction, while Taunton Deane gets only a 26% reduction. Who devised these massive, multimember wards for very rural areas? This whole thing reeks of political gerrymandering on a massive scale. A consultation has taken place, but this does not appear to have been satisfactory. Like a lot of consultations, the questions asked are often to produce the answers required. I note that the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee was concerned about the nature of the consultation. I quote from a letter sent to that committee, which I received this morning:
“The public consultation was biased in many ways as noted earlier in HL Paper, but it is not mentioned that the proponents of the merger had promoted it in the local press as a fait accompli, (emphasising that the councils had already taken a vote and the proposal to merge had already been sent to the Minister) BEFORE this consultation took place. It was also repeatedly claimed, inaccurately, that the merger per se would save £3.1m”.
I turn briefly to the predatory and unwelcome bid on 2 May by the leader of the county council to form a unitary county. We can see from press reports in the Telegraph on Monday that Somerset County Council is running a deficit budget. It is, therefore, looking to the districts, which are solvent, to bail them out. The leader of the county council says:
“This is the start of the conversation. At this stage the situation is best described as being in ‘talks about talks’ and I’m adamant that I will enter into these conversations with an open mind and nothing on my agenda except delivering long-term sustainable services for Somerset’s residents”.
Still on the subject of unitary, he says:
“I know the announcements earlier this month may have been unsettling, and even worrying, to some staff within SCC and also the districts, especially where it was coupled with alarming headlines. That was not the aim of publicising our discussions and I’m happy to apologise to staff in all organisations if that was the consequence”.
I find these words somewhat disingenuous.
The press release from the five district council leaders who met last Friday, states:
“The leaders of all five district councils together with the County Council have pledged today to work together on a joint review of local governance in Somerset. The aim of the review will be to determine the best way of delivering local public services and meeting community outcomes in Somerset in the future.
Whilst the details of the review are still to be finalised, the leaders have committed to some important principles including … Ensuring the review is independent of any one or group of organisations and that the focus of the review is on what is best for Somerset and its communities … Considering a range of options for the future”,
with all options having,
“a robust business case analysis … Inviting others, including health care, to work with the councils on the review … To engage with communities and stakeholders through the review process, keep people informed and undertake community consultation before any final decisions are made”.
Work will now commence on drawing up detailed plans and timetables for the review, and further updates will be issued in due course.
There was a date in the other place on the proposed unitary yesterday—this despite the leader of the county council taking the trouble to go to London to lobby the MPs on his proposal. However, his proposal did  not meet with unqualified support. I do not doubt that West Somerset is in desperate straits but, if Taunton Deane does not wish to continue its collaboration with it, why not look to Sedgemoor District Council? It also has a boundary with West Somerset and together they form one parliamentary constituency, represented by Ian Liddell-Grainger, who, incidentally, is opposed to the merger that we have before us today. He is recorded as saying that he was gobsmacked at the unitary proposal—and I take that from Hansard.
The costs of the merger are large, setting up a shadow authority on 1 April to be overtaken by the new authority in May 2019 and then, again, by a possible unitary authority. This seems like a desperate waste of taxpayers’ money. I regret that I do not think now is the right time to be progressing this proposal.